Drawbacks in the efficient monitoring of gold nanoparticle-based cisplatin delivery systems formation by HPLC-ICP-MS.

Since classical chemotherapy suffers many limitations related to numerous side effects of anticancer drugs (e.g. cisplatin), the nanoparticles are probed as carriers in targeted drug delivery. Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are broadly investigated due to their biocompatibility, nontoxicity, and tunable surface. Despite many AuNPs-cisplatin systems (AuNP-CS) reports found in the literature, only a few include direct studies of their synthesis and formation efficiency using analytical tools providing simultaneously qualitative and quantitative analytical information. Therefore, this research continues our previous study of AuNP-CS formation investigated by the hyphenation of capillary electrophoresis (CE) and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Namely, it presents the analogical approach but employs the coupling of another separation technique: isocratic reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) with ICP-MS detection. The study concerns the difficulties of the analytical method optimization path and contains an extended discussion of the observed problematic issues related to the analysis and preparation of AuNP-CS. Moreover, the presented work confronts the performance and applicability of both tools for scrutiny of AuNP-CS, especially considering the comparison of their resolution power.